The Politics of Conscience: T. H. Green and his Age (review)

96 HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY It is this awareness of Nietzsehe's greatness as an artist that is not only the principal justification of Hollingdale's book but in a double sense the principal contribution which he has made to Nietzsehe studies. His sensitivity to Nietzsche's preeminence in this regard is, of course, not unprecedented and in one or two places seems to me excessive, as in his claim that Nietzsche has no equal as a literary artist in philosophy except Plato and that Ecce Homo is on a par with the Jupiter Symphony--though on the same page on which this latter remark appears, Hollingdale wisely warns readers of the mixture of greatness and absurdity in Ecce Homo. Hollingdale's translations of passages from Nietzsche in the biography--some citations being a page or more in length--have the same admirable qualities as his previously published edition of Zarathustra (Penguin Classics, 1961). He seems to me singularly successful in avoiding both the quasi-Biblical cadences of the original Oscar Levy edition and an alternative prosiness except in those passages in which Nietzsche himself is prosy. There has been no "complete" Nietzsehe in English since Levy's, but there have been a number of excellent translations, besides Hollingdale's, of individual books by Marianna Cowan, Francis Golffing, and Walter Kaufmann. Perhaps an enterprising publisher coutd secure these versions and add to them, with the ultimate objective of a genuinely complete edition. JAMES CUTMANN Columbia University The Politics o] Conscience: T. H. Green and his Age. By Melvin Richter. (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1964. Pp. 415. $7.50.) Professor Richter has written what may be called a biography of the Oxford Idealist movement in the second half of nineteenth-century England. The manner in which the political theory and activities of T. H. Green are compared with his philosophic and religious views is as fascinating as most of Green's writings are dry. "Between 1880 and 1914, few, if any, other philosophers exerted a greater influence upon British thought and public policy than did T. H. Green" (/3). What, then, accounts for the influence of a man whose philosophical writings and lectures were couched in heavy Hegelian terminology? Richter offers several answers. Primarily, however, the answer is found in Green's personal style of life as a teacher and as a citizen (370). It is worth noting that Green's life, brief as it was, incorporated three innovations: he was the first layman to be elected a Fellow of Balliol; he was its first professional philosopher; and the first Oxford don to be elected to the town council, not as a representative of the University, but by standing in the same way as any ordinary resident, in his case, of the North Ward (346). When Asquith became Prime Minister his major regret was "that Jowett and Green had not lived to see their faith in him justified" (373). Green was able to offer many Oxford men a cause to which they could dedicate themselves. He instilled in them a sense of guilt and a feeling of responsibility to the less advantaged classes of England--hence "the politics of conscience"l--and offered them an intellectual frame of reference which weighed more toward comprehensiveness than toward precision and linguistic c/arity (370). Richter emphasizes the practical empiricism of the political labors of Green, whose Principles of Political Obligation~ takes on a new meaning when read in light of his work as an effective reformer and highly respected citizen. "Green had gone straight from the poll where he had been elected a town councillor to lecture on the Critique of Pure Reason" (346). Green's lay sermons "The Witness of God" and "Faith" provide a key to understanding his social philosophy and its impact on others. Indeed, "if a philosophy of religion is to be judged by its fruits, then many of the allegations that have been made about the conBrand Blanshard holds that this book is "the weightiest work in English on political theory" (Reason and Goodness [New York: The Macmillan Co., 1961], p. 394). BOOK REVIEWS 97 servative implications of Idealism will have to be reconsidered in the light of what...